Why do cats purr? How far away is the sun? Why is the sky blue? How does temperature affect mood? A list of questions pop up in everyone's curious minds throughout the day, but what is our go-to method to answer these questions? Google, of course! Google presents a variety of results from academic to opinionated resources. It is often to difficult to distinguish these results and determine which are accurate or even be able to narrow down an answer by reviewing information on multiple sites. But let's be honest, who actually takes the time to page through Google's millions of results? It may take more time to read through articles in databases, but at least the information is reliable. My goal is to find information using only databases, by using different combinations of words in my research question.
My research topic is censorship in education, and I can even broaden that to censorship in the media.
First I used a couple other basic search engines and searched a variety of combinations of the name of my topic. I went to Bing and searched "censorship in schools" and came up with some news sites, blogs, polls and even some ".org" sites. There were about 5.5 million results. Then I searched "freedom of education" and came up with 53 millions results.The resources seemed a bit more reliable than Google! Now using Yahoo I am going to see what results I can come up with. I found a lot of the same sites as I did on Google. I found Wikipedia and Yahoo Answers quite frequently, unless I scrolled down a bit to find some more reliable material. I played around with key words and found some common resources among each search I did.
Next, I searched "censorship in education" in a database, mentioned in Bruce Ballenger's The Curious Reader, called ERIC. My results were from "Censorship Challenges to Books" to "Intellectual Freedom for Young Adolescents" to "Classroom Censorship for Better or Worse" and even "Art Education". There are not as many results as in Google, but the resources are much more effective for pulling information from. The results can be refined by publication date, publication type and education level. In the same database, I searched "censor textbooks" and got many different search results by simply changing a few words. I found a source entitled "Censorship Revisited" from 1998. I think it's good to get some sources from the previous years and also the present to show some comparisons.
I then visited noodletools.com to find some sites that would work best for my topic. This time I decided to go to a government database (USA.gov) to see the laws about censorship. I searched "censorship" because I wanted a general understanding of the laws. My search results brought me to a site called "Federal Communications Commission" and found another site called "National Conference of State Legislature" which was also helpful.
I found some great accurate sources I wouldn't have come across if I limited myself to Google!
Delaney, looks like you did some effective digging! You mentioned a few common sources showing up in multiple searches that you did. What were these common sources? Do you think they are important sources to review and include in your essay? Were they academic or popular sources? Why do you think they continued to show up again and again? Just a few questions to keep you thinking about your research results!
ReplyDelete